What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It?

In the mid-1990s, Be Inc. had the audacity to create a brand-new personal computer operating system from scratch. It gained critical acclaim for its ahead-of-its-time features, but failed to capture significant market share. It’s still a cult favorite 25 years later, and here’s why. BeOS is a now-defunct multimedia operating system that was first introduced in October 1995 for Be Inc.’s BeBox computer. The driving forces behind Be were Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s former vice president of product development, and Steve Sakoman, creator of the Apple Newton. With these tech credentials, Be had the industry’s ear right from the start.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

  Security updates have been issued by Gentoo (freetype), openSUSE (mailman), Red Hat (firefox, java-11-openjdk, OpenShift Container Platform 3.11.306 jenkins, and rh-maven35-jackson-databind), SUSE (kernel, mercurial, openldap2, python-pip, and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox, netty-3.9, and python-pip).

• An Analysis of 5 Million OpenPGP Keys

  In July I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in IT Security at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Poelten. During the studies I did some elective courses, one of which was about Data Analysis using Python, Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks. I found it very interesting to do calculations on different data sets and to visualize them. Towards the end of the Bachelor I had to find a topic for my Bachelor Thesis and as a long time user of OpenPGP I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of the collection of OpenPGP keys that are available on the keyservers of the SKS keyserver network. So in June 2019 I fetched a copy of one of the key dumps of the one of the keyservers (some keyserver publish these copies of their key database so people who want to join the SKS keyserver network can do an initial import). At that time the copy of the key database contained 5,499,675 keys and was around 12GB. Using the hockeypuck keyserver software I imported the keys into an PostgreSQL database. Hockeypuck uses a table called keys to store the keys and in there the column doc stores the OpenPGP keys in JSON format (always with a data field containing the original unparsed data). For the thesis I split the analysis in three parts, first looking at the Public Key packets, then analysing the User ID packets and finally studying the Signature Packets. To analyse the respective packets I used SQL to export the data to CSV files and then used the pandas read_csv method to create a dataframe of the values. In a couple of cases I did some parsing before converting to a DataFrame to make the analysis step faster. The parsing was done using the pgpdump python library. Together with my advisor I decided to submit the thesis for a journal, so we revised and compressed the whole paper and the outcome was now

• Exploring 8chan's hosting infrastructure | Netcraft News

  In a recent post, Brian Krebs discussed a technique for disrupting 8chan, a controversial message board. Ron Guilmette, a security researcher, spotted that N.T. Technology, the hosting company owned by 8chan’s current operator, no longer has the right to transact business as it is in the “administrative hold” state. ARIN, the Internet registry N.T. Technology obtained its IP address allocation from, would be within its rights to reclaim the IP address space. Ron Guilmette is an expert in this type of analysis - last year he discovered the theft of $50 million worth of IP addresses in AFRINIC’s service region. However, taking down 8chan is unlikely to be as simple as requesting that ARIN deallocates its IP adddress space. After deallocation, the IP addresses may continue to be advertised as fullbogons - netblocks that are used on the Internet despite not being assigned to an end user. While some Internet service providers do block fullbogons, this is by no means universal.

• 23 Extensions to Enhance your Security and Privacy on Google Chrome and Chromium-based Browser

  According to a statistical report published by Statista in July 2020, Google Chrome accounted for 69% of the global desktop web-browser market share by June 2020, with 11% increase from the last year. Google Chrome is mostly based on Chromium which is an open-source web-browser released and maintained by Google. Chromium itself is the base for a dozen other browsers that are compatible with Google Chrome Web store. In this article we will guide you through the best privacy and security browser extensions for Google Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers that support Google Chrome Web store.

Single Points of Failure and Proprietary Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

• Ahmad Haghighi: GitLab blocked Iranians’ access.

  On 3rd Oct. 2020 GitLab blocked Iranians’ access (based on IP) without any prior notice! and five days later (8th Oct.) my friend’s account blocked and still he doesn’t have any access to his projects! even after creating a ticket and asks for a temporary access to only export his projects! GitLab refused to unblock him! (screenshot in appendix). My friend is not the only one who blocked by GitLab, with a simple search on the web you can find a growing list of blocked accounts. So I decided to move from GtiLab and EVERY Free Software based/hosted/managed on/in USA. When it comes to USA policies, Free Software is a Joke :) GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes and etc.

• ‘youtube-dl’ downloading software removed from GitHub by RIAA takedown notice

  This takedown notice does not necessarily spell the permanent end of youtube-dl. GitHub always immediately takes down any source code project that receives a DMCA notice like this, but the project’s creators will have an opportunity to file a counterclaim in the hopes of restoring youtube-dl’s status on GitHub. We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as it develops.

• RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it can be used to slurp music

  YouTube-DL is pretty simple to use: you give the command-line program the URL of any YouTube video, and it will fetch the material and save it to your computer for future playback.

• Recording Industry Association of America Gets Youtube-dl Kicked Off GitHub

  Microsoft GitHub has removed all traces of the very useful youtube-dl utility for downloading videos from YouTube and other websites, including this one, following a questionable DMCA request from the Recording Industry Association of America.

  youtube-dl is a simple command-line utility that lets you easily download audio adn videos from just about any website with a file file embedded in it. It works on sites like this one. A lot of software, including the popular video player mpv, can use it to download video fragments on the fly so videos embedded in web pages can be opened and played as if they were local files.

  The Recording Industry Association of America submitted a DMCA request to Microsoft GitHub demanding that youtube-dl gets removed from the Internet on October 23rd, 2020. The complaint contains this rather misleading claim: [...]